Fortune 100 Companies Have Received a Whopping $1.2 Trillion in Corporate Welfare Recently

ATS post by deadcalm.
I want to draw your attention to this article I just came across. It details…just as the title implies…how the American government took the Americans people’s hard earned tax dollars….and transferred them straight to banks and corporations. Welfare on a truly epic scale.

I find this interesting for a number of reasons. I have seen a number of ATS members complaining about people on welfare, food stamps..ect. as being a drain on their tax dollars….cries of socialism abound, and as usually ends up happening…the poor somehow end up to blame. Well that stops now!

One prime example of this is the current debate over raising minimum wage to $15 per hour….a living wage. I have seen members hotly defend corporations and businesses and their right to pay people far less than a living wage.

All of this while, unbeknownst to you…the taxpayer…your government has given out 1.2 TRILLION in handouts to corporations, banks….and not surprisingly….defence contractors. This figure doesn’t include the 780 BILLION dollar bailout to the big banks at the hight of the banking crisis….a crisis that was cause by THEM. Even in the face of massive fraud that cost tens of millions of Americans their homes.

From the article…

Most of us are aware that the government gives mountains of cash to powerful corporations in the form of tax breaks, grants, loans and subsidies–what some have called “corporate welfare.” However, little has been revealed about exactly how much money Washington is forking over to mega businesses.

UNTIL NOW

A new venture called Open the Books, based in Illinois, was founded with a mission to bring transparency to how the federal budget is spent. And what they found is shocking: between 2000 and 2012, the top Fortune 100 companies received $1.2 trillion from the government. That doesn’t include all the billions of dollars doled out to housing, auto and banking enterprises in 2008-2009, nor does it include ethanol subsidies to agribusiness or tax breaks for wind turbine makers.

Shocking indeed. If you want to see which banks and corporations got your money….

After military contractors, $21.8 billion was granted out to corporate recipients in the form of direct subsidies; literally transfers of cash from the pockets of Americans to major corporations. The biggest winners were General Electric (GE) ($380 million), followed by General Motors (GM) ($370 million), Boeing (BA) ($264 million), ADM ($174 million) and United Technologies ($160 million).

So, here we have Fortune 100 companies, among the richest in the world…being handed 10’s even 100’s of billions of your tax dollars. Just for any who do not know what a Fortune 100 company is…

An annual list of the 100 largest public and privately-held companies in the United States. The ranking is compiled using gross revenue figures, and is published by Fortune magazine.

The Fortune 100 list is more exclusive than both the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 lists, both of which rank more companies.

In light of this revelation I think that it’s safe to say that the poor are NOT THE BIGGEST PROBLEM. Once again folks have been fooled into pointing their ire totally in the wrong direction.

Conversely, the government is cutting social programs like SNAP….no doubt because it takes away from the money of yours that they could be shovelling to private corporations and defence contractors.

The 2009 Recovery Act’s temporary boost to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits is scheduled to end on November 1, 2013, resulting in a benefit cut for nearly every SNAP household.[2] For families of three, the cut will be $29 a month — a total of $319 for November 2013 through September 2014, the remaining months of fiscal year 2014.[3] That’s a serious loss, especially in light of the very low amount of basic SNAP benefits. Without the Recovery Act’s boost, SNAP benefits will average less than $1.40 per person per meal in 2014. (See Table 2 for estimates of the size of the SNAP cut in each state in fiscal year 2014.) Nationally, the total cut is estimated to be $5 billion in fiscal year 2014.

So hungry citizens will have to make do with $1.40 PER MEAL, so that these corporate and banking entities can continue to RAPE THE WEALTH OF A NATION.

So the next time you start to get hot under the collar about your tax dollars being wasted supporting the poor, maybe you should look at where the biggest drain on your economy is.

I just want to leave you all with this additional gem….

The Fed’s $16 Trillion Bailouts Under-Reported

The audit of the Fed’s emergency lending programs was scarcely reported by mainstream media – albeit the results are undoubtedly newsworthy. It is the first audit of the Fed in United States history since its beginnings in 1913. The findings verify that over $16 trillion was allocated to corporations and banks internationally, purportedly for “financial assistance” during and after the 2008 fiscal crisis.